White wine may not really exist

THAT Chardonnay you’re drinking is more of a red wine than it looks. It turns out that white grapes also contain the pigments that give red wine its colour – anthocyanins.

Most sources say that “what distinguishes red from white is that white wine grapes don’t have anthocyanins,” says Panagiotis Arapitsas of Italy’s Edmund Mach Foundation. His team used mass spectrometry to analyse the skins of grapes from Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling grapes, which are used in the production of white wine. They found these white grapes did contain anthocyanins, although in concentrations several thousand times smaller than in red grape varieties such as Merlot (Food Research International, doi.org/xrh).

Arapitsas says this shines light on one of wine-making’s oldest curiosities – why white-wine producers occasionally end up with a wine that is a bit pink. “Sometimes there were producers of white wines who collected white grapes and ended up with a slightly rosé wine,” he says. “Now they have some information about why that happened.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “White wines might not really exist”